5 Mini PC Trends in 2025 and Beyond

There is no question that mini PCs are becoming the dominant force in home labs, home office spaces, and those that are looking at even other things like AI and productivity. I know I have converted my home lab fleet over to mini PCs and mini PC boards for running all my production workloads in the lab environment. Where are mini PCs headed in 2025 and beyond? What mini PC trends are on the horizon? Let’s consider 5 mini PC trends for 2025 and beyond and see what capabilities are soon to come.

Disclosure: The links for mini PCs below are monetized by the Amazon affiliate programs and I earn a small commission from those clicking on those links.

1. AI features and NPU integration

If you have been keeping pace with the technology industry, we know that artificial intelligence has been the hot topic for the past 3 years now or so. Especially generative AI has been the direction that most organizations and companies have been going in releasing new products and solutions.

However, now, instead of just being a cloud-centric technology that runs in the public cloud, these powerful local language models or LLMs can run on local hardware. This requires hardware that can run LLM AI technology like, dedicated GPUs or dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPUs).

New hardware, especially processors like Intel’s Core Ultra chips (Meteor Lake) include something called Intel AI Boost. AMD’s Ryzen 8000 series CPUs have something called XDNA AI engines. These offer AI acceleration natively. What can this hardware help with?

• Video conferencing enhancements (think blur, background removal, eye tracking)
• AI-powered upscaling in media editing
• Localized large language model (LLM) processing for coding assistants or chatbots
• AI-enabled surveillance and smart cameras

Newer mini PCs like the ASUS NUC 15 Pro and Pro Plus have hardware that helps with AI tasks. Minisforum just released their AI 370 have the Ryzen AI 9 HX processor and Radeon graphics to speed up CoPilot and other AI driven tools. These are just a couple of examples.

Below is the Asus NUC 15 Pro:

• https://amzn.to/4hNO7IA

Below is the Minisforum AI370 with the Ryzen AI 9 processor:

• https://amzn.to/4kTGIKp

There is no question that this mini PC trend for incorporating AI into mini PC form factors will continue in 2025 and beyond.

2. Modular and upgrade-friendly designs

One of the trends we are seeing that is catching on thanks to popular designs from companies like Framework are modular and upgradeable mini PCs. In the early days and not so long ago, there wasn’t really a whole lot you could do with a mini PC outside of upgrading your hard drive or memory.

However, a trend in 2025 and beyond is to introduce modular designs. This means that you will not only be allowed to upgrade your storage and memory, but may allow ones to upgrade Wi-Fi cards, and even things like CPUs and GPUs.

Note the following mini PC models that are highly upgradeable and modular:

• Framework Mini PCs, which offer CPUs that are socketed and also have swappable IO modules.
• Minisforum BD790i and MS-01 – The BD series is a mini PC style motherboard that allows building around the unit to have a highly customizable build including a PCI-e x16 slot and SODIMM DDR5 slots, M.2 NVMe storage options
• AsRock and Gigabyte barebones kits – These allow users to build out their own configurations using standard laptop or desktop components

Below is the Minisforum BD795i SE mini ITX motherboard:

• https://amzn.to/4iVckxr

These modular designs around mini PC type builds I think is really going to take off. Framework has completely sold out of their first batch of the modular mini PC builds and I think it shows the heavy interest in this feature from the community.

We’re also seeing heavy innovation in tool-less cases, hot-swappable NVMe trays, and even compute module ecosystems where different CPU or GPU options can be swapped in and out.

3. High-Speed Networking and I/O designs

This area has been one where we have been seeing trends of strengthening for some time now. Gone are the days where you just have a single 1 GbE port. Now, most mini PCs are shipping with a bare minimum spec of at least a ;single 2.5 GbE multi-gig adapter and some with dual 2.5 GbE adapters.

However, more exciting to me is that we are seeing more and more mini PCs with 10 GbE adapters like the MS-01 and the forthcoming MS-A2. Definitely exciting hardware from the networking side of things. Why is this trend important?

Below is the Minisforum MS-01 (a very popular home lab choice)

• https://amzn.to/4iFunrS

Note the following:

• Home lab setups with virtualization can easily take advantage of the 10 GbE for HCI configurations and other types of traffic. 10 GbE is really the minimum I would say for virtualized environments in 2025.
• If you want to build high performance routers and firewalls, mini PCs make a great option. Having the faster networking means you can work with faster Internet connections, etc
• Edge compute solutions can be built around mini PCs with faster networking

Besides traditional networking, mini PCs in 2025 are embracing:

• USB4 and Thunderbolt 4: These allow external GPU (eGPU) support and storage expansion with lots of bandwidth
• DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1: These support 4K and 8K multi-monitor setups
• PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives: These have blazing fast read/write speeds for virtualization, content creators and developers

4. Silent and fanless designs are gaining popularity

Mini PC trends also include another aspect that is important to home labs and home office setups centered around modern mini PCs – quiet operation. As perfromance of mini PCs continues to climb, quieter PCs are becoming more desirable.

Now mini PC manufacturers are designing systems that are fanless or nearly completely silent under normal load.

We’re seeing advances in:

• Passive cooling with large fin-stack heatsinks and vapor chambers
• Graphene thermal pads for better heat transfer in small spaces
• Low-power chips like Intel’s Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen 8000U series that perform well without needing aggressive active cooling

There’s a new class of mini PCs focused on zero-fan operation, like the Zotac ZBOX edge series and some industrial Minisforum fanless variants.

Below is the Zotac Zbox:

• https://amzn.to/4c26gB8

Many mini PCs now draw under 15–20 watts idle and peak at under 100 watts, even while running virtual machines, etc. That’s appealing for home labs which are always-on environments or for anyone wanting to have a low-energy footprint.

5. Server-Class and multi-NVMe mini PCs for home labs

It is exciting to me to see the rise of mini PCs as home servers or lightweight datacenter nodes. Unlike Raspberry Pi’s that are underpowered on the compute side of things, these types of mini PCs are small but powerful. They are serious machines that can run real-world workloads very well.

They include specs like:

• 64GB+ DDR5 memory support
• 3 to 4 NVMe M.2 slots
• ECC RAM in workstation-class models (still harder to find)
• Integrated RAID or U.2 / PCIe slot support

Take the Minisforum MS-01 or Minisforum MS-A1, for example. These models include 3 or 4 NVMe slots, dual 2.5GbE ports, dual 10 GbE (MS-01) and support for high-performance APUs with AI and GPU capabilities. These are perfect for running things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, Docker Swarm, or even Kubernetes clusters VERY well.

Use cases driving this trend include:

• Homelab testing environments
• Virtualized apps and self-hosting
• DIY NAS systems
• AI inferencing

The appeal of these systems are clear. Especially for home labs, they offer server-level performance and capabilities in a device that fits very comfortably in your hand, is relatively quiet by comparison to a server, has MUCH lower power draw and doesn’t break the bank.

What’s next for Mini PCs?

I think mini PC trends are clear in that we see powerful computing continue to be packed into a small package that is effective in running some very production like solutions and self-hosting applications. You can use these now to run really anything that you can run in the data center on true server class machines.

As we think about what is beyond 2025, I think we will continue to see mini PCs that continue to increase in their performance with modern chips, have more modular designs for upgrading and home lab enthusiasts and have smart features for edge computing. These are also becoming increasingly desirable for AI development.

A few mini PC trends we expect to see:

• Mini PCs with discrete GPUs built into small form factor designs
• Clustered mini PCs with built-in mesh networking for scale-out computing
• AI-enhanced BIOS and firmware that can efficiently optimize performance and energy consumption
• Cloud-native mini PCs for Docker, Kubernetes, and serverless frameworks right out of the box

Wrapping up

Mini PCs are here to stay and mini PC trends continue to excite and enthusiastically drive their own trends as we go along. Home lab enthusiasts, developers, and everyone benefits as these very powerful little machines continue to grow and evolve into more and more capable platforms.

Keep an eye out for specs like AI NPUs, 2.5GbE and 10GbE support, multi-NVMe, and modular upgrades. These are no longer fringe features, but rather they are becoming the new normal.